SEGA Of Japan Employees Strike

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By IGN Staff

So it's come to this. In Japan, if a company wants to lay off a group of employees, the words "lay off" will rarely be heard. Instead, the group of employees will be asked to "voluntarily retire." Of course, more often than not, there's nothing voluntary about it - if you don't retire, you'll find yourself transferred to "the room," where you're given zero responsibilities in the hope that you'll get fed up and have a change of heart.

And so we have Sega. Sega, Sega, Sega.... Troubled Sega. Sega Enterprises recently announced a set of "voluntary resignations" designed to cut costs by eliminating employee overhead. And just like that we knew "the room" was being prepared for those who refused the honor. According to Japan's Mainichi Shimbu (a big newspaper in Japan), twelve Sega employees did indeed refuse to voluntarily retire, and they were, as expected, transferred to the "isolation room" (that's how the newspaper phrases it).

The twelve employees refused the transfer and instead joined up with a regional branch of the JIMU labor union. On the second of April, about thirty members from the group protested outside of Sega headquarters, using megaphones to announce the evils of this Japanese practice. Additionally, members of the group passed out flyers to Sega employees.

IGNDC salutes these twelve heroes for fighting back against this evil, evil system of language abuse.